Independent agents often ask, “Don't I have to be a large agency to build a brand?” The answer is an emphatic “no!” How you build your brand will depend on your agency infrastructure and the amount of time and resources that you devote to this process.
Small, medium or large — it doesn't matter. What does matter is your desire to create and support an agency environment to ensure the delivery of an exceptional experience for customers that you can replicate and merchandise in your community.
Agents who are ready to build their brand should consider these three steps: Define, integrate, and deliver.
DEFINE YOUR BRAND
Begin by setting benchmarks. If you have an agency — with office, phones, customers, and employees — you've already established a brand of some type. The key is to find out what your current brand is and what it says about the customer experience you deliver. Instead of making assumptions about your brand, ask your customers. They'll provide honest, reliable feedback if the questions are posed correctly. There are several ways to get the information you need:
• Hire a consultant to conduct discussion groups with customers. These are usually sessions with a cross-section of your customer base and anywhere from 12 to 15 participants. The consultant will use a series of questions designed to determine customer experiences with the agency, compared with their expectations. Major themes uncovered will reveal the components of your brand and elements that you might want to modify.
• Conduct the same type of focus group, facilitating the discussion yourself or having someone from the agency run the meeting. In my experience, customers are not bashful regarding their experiences; so you should receive honest and unfiltered feedback.
• Mail a customer feedback piece as an insert in a renewal mailing or an off-cycle, “Thanks for your business” mailing. The theme is “How are we doing?” This can be a brief (10 to 15-question) survey focusing on why customers do business with you and what they like or dislike.
• Use a point-of-service questionnaire or interview. When customers call or stop by your agency for service, ask them to answer a brief questionnaire. The CSR or producer can ask a series of questions focused on your customers' feelings or experiences in dealing with you and your agency. Within 30 days you should have a fairly decent amount of data.
The bottom line: Get input from your customers. There's no way to set a strategy until you have a benchmark. Think of taking a trip in your car. Before hitting the accelerator you need to determine exactly where you are and make such key checks as fuel level and tire pressure. The Define element of your plan assesses where you are and what your gauges are telling you.
It's essential to get feedback on your brand from your employees. Where appropriate, they can help synthesize and understand customer feedback. You might also ask them, “What one thing could we implement right now that would make it easier for customers to do business with us?”
INTEGRATE YOUR EFFORTS
Once you've determined the strengths and weaknesses of your brand, you're in a position to begin enhancing it. Employee participation plays a key role in this process. For employees to embrace change, they need to feel that they're in control. Remember that branding is a long-term project. Integration will succeed if you break it down into manageable stages or steps. If you overwhelm employees in your enthusiasm to rebuild your brand, you'll build resistance instead.
Branding combines all the touch points you have with your customers. Because employees usually control most of those points, help them feel that they're in control of their work processes and destiny. To ensure successful integration of your plan, follow these steps:
• Analyze the data from your customer feedback surveys. If possible, use all — or at least a cross-section — of your employees to do this.
• Ask, “What do our customers like and dislike about their experiences with our agency?”
• Develop a start-stop-continue list (Based on our customer input, which activities should we stop, start, or continue?).
• Develop an action list. Be sure to get employee input and support.
• Stage the integration plan over time, with appropriate checkpoints and employee meetings to determine the success of changes — not merely the fact that they've been made.
• Include these components in your integration plan: Process modification, new customer acquisition, advertising, employee feedback, and measurement.
DELIVER THE GOODS
All good ideas ultimately result in work. The delivery phase gets to the actual implementation of your brand-improvement plan. Successful implementation requires these steps:
• Develop, set, and communicate expectations for your plan.
• Keep employees energized. Although agency principals are responsible for designing the plan, employees must deliver many of the actions critical to success. Thus, it's essential that they feel responsible and accountable.
• If you can't measure it, question whether you should be doing it. The activities that will drive your brand should have set targets measured regularly.
• Fine-tune the plan. Building a brand is a very personal thing. Although the framework is generic, the plan you build is solely yours — and thus uncharted territory. Don't be afraid to adjust the processes or actions that aren't achieving the results you want.
• Get feedback from employees and customers. Meet with them regularly to see how the plan is being received and supported. Continually monitor customer perception of your brand.
Larry Acord (mailto:[email protected]), IIABA vice president for consumer marketing, is responsible for the Trusted Choice brand. This article is reproduced, with permission, from Independent Agent magazine.